System Granted Me Immortality; I Outlived Everyone

Chapter 6: Artificial Spirit Root, Chen Changsheng’s Unexpected Harvest

He wiped away the bloodstains, meticulously stitching the scattered flaps of skin and flesh back together.

He stripped away the tattered, blood-soaked clothes and dressed the corpse in a crisp, brand-new burial shroud.

Chen Changsheng tidied the corpse’s appearance with the utmost care. He treated every step of the process with the solemn seriousness of a dedicated professional.

Half an hour later, the deceased looked almost human again. Chen Changsheng had even scoured the surrounding dirt to find and replace the scattered teeth, one by one.

His work complete, he gave the beast-skin bag at his waist a light pat.

A heavy, high-quality wooden coffin materialized with a dull thud.

After carefully lowering the corpse inside, Chen Changsheng pulled out a geomantic compass to scout the surrounding hills for an auspicious burial plot.

Digging the grave, hauling the coffin, and lowering it into the earth—even with the little monk acting as an assistant, the manual labor took Chen Changsheng a full two hours.

But just as he prepared to erect the tombstone, he paused.

“Little monk, standard procedure for a tombstone requires the deceased’s name. I also need the name of the one erecting it.”

“What was this customer’s name?”

Hearing this, the little monk clasped his hands together. “This benefactor was the Sect Leader of the Heavenly Demon Sect. He went by the title of Blood Demon Ancestor. No one knows his true birth name.”

“As for the one erecting the stone… Benefactor, you may handle that yourself.”

“I am bound by my temple’s precepts. I cannot officially erect a monument for a demonic cultivator.”

Chen Changsheng clicked his tongue in mild annoyance. He drew his finger across the blank stone, carving the epitaph:

The Blood Demon Ancestor of the Heavenly Demon Sect rests here. — The Undertaker.

The little monk stared at the fresh carving in confusion. “Benefactor, is your title ‘The Undertaker’?”

“Yep.”

“I run a coffin shop. My entire business model is corpse collection and burial services. If I’m not an undertaker, what else would I call myself?”

Dusting off his hands, Chen Changsheng turned to leave, tossing a casual wave over his shoulder.

“The service has been rendered. I’ll be taking my leave.”

“If you run into any more dead bodies in the future, remember to give me a call.”

The little monk tilted his head, watching Chen Changsheng’s retreating back for a very long time.

It was the first time he had ever met someone so intensely mundane.

There was just something indescribably bizarre about the man.

……

Linglong Town.

The moment Chen Changsheng stepped back into his coffin shop, he bolted the front door shut. He held up a single, slightly bloody tooth, examining it with peak curiosity.

It was a tooth he had pried from the jaws of the Blood Demon Ancestor.

At a glance, it looked like standard human enamel. But under the light, microscopic Formation patterns glinted across the bone.

If he hadn’t been so thorough in his mortuary duties, he never would have guessed a supreme demonic cultivator would hide something inside his own molar.

Chen Changsheng stroked his chin, a rare smile touching his lips.

“Looks like a miniature storage array. For the Blood Demon Ancestor to hide it this deeply, the payload has to be premium.”

With a flick of his wrist, over a dozen heavy, dust-covered tomes slammed onto his work desk.

Every single one was a manual on Formations.

Chen Changsheng’s actual talent for cultivation was absolute garbage. Fifty years of grinding had barely pushed him to the third layer of Qi Condensation.

A genuine prodigy could hit that level in the time it took to eat a bowl of noodles.

Once he accepted the cold, hard fact that the heavens hated him, Chen Changsheng pivoted. He poured all his energy into Formations and Alchemy.

Why? Because those were trades built on sheer, grinding accumulation. And if there was one thing Chen Changsheng had an infinite supply of, it was time.

Lighting a single oil lamp, he cracked open a book and began dissecting the microscopic array.

His knowledge of Formations was purely foundational, and the Blood Demon Ancestor’s lock was a masterclass in encryption.

But that didn’t matter. Chen Changsheng couldn’t die of old age.

If he couldn’t crack it in a day, he’d take a month. If a month failed, he’d take a year.

As long as he just kept chipping away at it, the grand array of a demonic overlord would eventually break down through sheer, brute-force persistence.

……

Three months vanished in the blink of an eye. Chen Changsheng didn’t step outside his shop once.

It was a good thing the funeral business in a small town was slow, otherwise, the closed doors might have drawn unwanted attention.

“Phew.”

Chen Changsheng let out a long, stale breath, stretching a spine that popped like firecrackers.

It took a quarter of a year, but he had successfully brute-forced the Blood Demon Ancestor’s security.

“Pseudo Spirit Root?”

He stared at the title of the ancient text resting in his palm, his brow furrowing.

Spirit Roots were the absolute foundation of a cultivator. They were the singular metric for measuring talent.

The baseline was the Five Elements Spirit Roots, strictly categorized into Low Grade, Middle Grade, High Grade, and Top Grade.

Top Grade was the pinnacle of natural talent. Beyond that, there were only the legendary mutated elements.

Mutated Spirit Roots were obscenely powerful, though wildly unpredictable.

But in fifty years of reading every scrap of lore he could find, he had never once heard the term “Pseudo Spirit Root.”

His pragmatic heart gave a rare flutter of genuine excitement. He loved a good mystery.

“Interesting. Let’s see what kind of heresy you were cooking up.”

Muttering to himself, he cracked open the first page.

As his eyes scanned the text, he quickly realized this wasn’t a standard cultivation manual or a forbidden martial art.

It was an autobiography. It documented the Blood Demon Ancestor’s entire life story.

As it turned out, the supreme overlord of the demonic path had been born with absolute garbage talent. He was the lowest of the low.

He had been cursed with a fractured Five Elements Mixed Spirit Root of the most pathetic quality.

After spending decades hard-stuck in the Qi Condensation realm, the ancestor had a radical, unhinged thought:

Since Spirit Roots exist physically, can they be artificially upgraded after birth?

Once the intrusive thought took root, he began his experiments.

Naturally, testing theoretical bio-alchemy on oneself was a fantastic way to explode. The ancestor wasn’t an idiot.

So, he started dissecting living test subjects.

A mountain of corpses later, he finally cracked the biological code of the Spirit Root.

He proved that Spirit Roots absolutely could not be enhanced through Pills, techniques, or Formations…

…or any other orthodox method known to mankind. However, a Spirit Root could be upgraded by cannibalizing another Spirit Root.

With this horrific scientific breakthrough, the Blood Demon Ancestor’s rise to power began.

He hunted down weaker cultivators, harvesting and devouring their Spirit Roots to artificially patch his own.

Through this gruesome positive feedback loop, his strength skyrocketed until he stood at the apex of the world.

Unfortunately, the biological patchwork eventually destabilized. The ensuing killing spree required to sustain it triggered a massive, multi-sect extermination crusade.

The memoir abruptly cut off right there.

“Tsk, tsk.”

“This guy was an absolute visionary.”

“To actually reverse-engineer something so completely unhinged… impressive.”

Nodding in professional appreciation, Chen Changsheng tossed the book into his system inventory.

“System, run the variables. This ‘Artificial Spirit Root’ theory the Blood Demon Ancestor proposed… is it mathematically viable?”

“The back half of this journal is filled with his theoretical schematics for an Artificial Spirit Root.”

“Frankly, his logic is incredibly sound.”